Hello AlphaBay newsletter subscribers! Being a secret dark-web crime lord, I've come to realize over a decade of writing about these rare figures, is lonely. You've achieved something epic, risen to the top of a vicious, ultra-competitive scrabble of anonymous, amoral fiends to become a digital boss, with millions of dollars in profits and tremendous power at your fingertips. But you can't tell anyone in the real world about your success or admit where your fortune came from. You are the best on the planet at what you do, and your freedom depends on that remaining a secret from everyone you know. |
This results in bad decisions, it turns out. Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road dark-web drug market, called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts and found an outlet for his ego by making himself a larger-than-life political figure on the site's forums. Under his pseudonym, the Dread Pirate posted endless anarcho-capitalist manifestos and love letters to his users that made him a legendary figure for the Silk Road's thousands of buyers and sellers—and also attracted enormous attention from law enforcement. Years later, after Ulbricht's arrest and the Silk Road takedown, I was shocked to learn that Ulbricht had also kept a journal and a logbook on his laptop, and even maintained records of his encrypted and anonymized communications with all Silk Road staffers. |
Ulbricht no doubt thought all of that incriminating information would be protected by his laptop's full-disk encryption—a protection that proved useless when the FBI managed to snatch his computer in an open and unlocked state. But Ulbricht, who is now 10 years into a life sentence in prison, also kept those records because he intended, eventually, for his deeds to be chronicled. "I imagine that someday I may have a story written about my life and it would be good to have a detailed account of it," he wrote in the journal, which I obtained and published during his trial in 2015. |
For Alexandre Cazes, the kingpin of the massive digital black market AlphaBay, it seems the loneliness at the top of the dark web led to a different kind of weirdness. Cazes, under his dark-web handle Alpha02, appears to have learned some lessons about discretion from Ulbricht and didn't make political pronouncements on AlphaBay or its user forums. In his surface life, with friends and family, he embraced luxury, but only in the relatively standard manner of an early Bitcoin investor, with the requisite Lamborghini and dinnery parties at ultra-expensive restaurants. |
As I began to report out the story of AlphaBay for my book Tracers in the Dark, making inroads on the facts of the case and finding sources among the agents and prosecutors who had investigated it, I worried that Cazes might actually be a boring antagonist. I had no doubt that in his head, there had been interesting, humanizing, complicated motivations. But it seemed impossible to unearth them: He had died in 2017, before I'd ever heard his name. |
Alexandre Cazes and his wife at his sprawling villa in Phuket, Thailand, from a Facebook screenshot. |
That's when sources began to tell me about—and later provide archived copies of—Cazes' posts on the Roosh V forum. Roosh V, as detailed in this third installment of our AlphaBay series, was a kind of hyper-toxic-masculine pickup artist web forum. It turned out that Cazes had created a second alter ego there, Rawmeo, and I began to see he had posted to the site endlessly, obsessively, under that name, detailing not only his life as a pathological womanizer and misogynist, but also his daily routine, his personal philosophy, and even his family background and childhood. |
Reading his posts, it became clear that this was where Cazes had sought the missing recognition he deserved, using sex as a stand-in for dark-web power and drug money. Just like Ulbricht, he had kept a journal, and this was it. His obsessive writing on Roosh V, I learned from the investigators hunting him, would turn out to be just as serious a flaw in his personal security as the Dread Pirate's criminal memoir. And in our series, which is otherwise essentially a dark-web police procedural, it's also the closest I ever came to getting inside Cazes's head.
Read Part 3 of our series on AlphaBay at the link below, and check out my book Tracers in the Dark, of which it's a part, here.
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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